Orðabækur, málfræðigrunar og netkennsla

Abstract

The reflections presented in this article grew out of the author’s experience in the development of an online grammar resource and glossary and their adaptation to the proficiency levels of the students and the content of Icelandic Online. Icelandic Online is an online tutorial for learning Icelandic as a foreign language. This article describes how the online grammar source and dictionary entries were scaffolded or layered so that they could benefit the beginning learner. These resources play an especially important role in the learning of inflected languages where words can have many different forms and there is a focus on form in the early stages of learning. The distinction between grammars and dictionaries as encyclopedias and as handbooks for language learning is highlighted and the importance of this distinction in current theories of adult language learning and pedagogy is discussed. Finally the author reflects on how scaffolding could ben- efit small languages like Icelandic as information contained in a single online linguistic resource could be layered in a similar fashion as the resources attached to Icelandic Online and thus be used as a handbook for practical purposes but also as a corpus for conducting research.